THE final series about a drug-dealing chemistry teacher starts tomorrow with Scottish actress Laura Fraser joining the cast.

IT'S the TV show everyone has been talking about – but has hardly seen a moment of traditional airtime.

As the final series of drug-dealing teacher drama Breaking Bad begins tomorrow, the team behind the imported smash hit have revealed how they turned Mr Chips into Scarface.

For the past five years, Breaking Bad has eclipsed similarly acclaimed shows such as The Wire in word-of-mouth, DVDs and downloads as must-see TV.

Initially shown on satellite channel FX and then Channel 5’s cable offshoots such as Five USA, most fans of the drama have been hooked by box sets.

The series stars Bryan Cranston as a clean-living chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

To meet his medical bills, he launches a crystal meth production lab with his former pupil Jesse, played by hotly rated young actor Aaron Paul.

The cast have been boosted for the final series by the addition of Scottish actress Laura Fraser, best known for films such as A Knight’s Tale and lesbian drama series Lip Service.

The gripping premise has enthralled millions of fans around the world and turned Cranston, previously best known as the gormless dad from Malcolm In The Middle, into one of the most-lauded actors in Hollywood.

As the second half of the fifth and final season is launched on US telly tonight, and will be available to stream live in the UK from tomorrow on web service Netflix, creator Vince Gilligan told how he brought Albuquerque anti-hero Walter White to the small screen.

He said: “When I pitched the series from the get-go, I used the sort of charming, if not overused at this point, glib line of, ‘We’re going to take Mr Chips and turn him into Scarface’.

“We abided by that for six years but, having said that, it leaves a lot of wiggle room. That leaves an awful lot of room for changing up the plot.

“I can’t even remember what my original ending was. I couldn’t see that far ahead and I really was not able to see the forest for the trees for the longest time over these last six years.”

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The show has been shown in the US via cable channel AMC and has been a massive success, scoring dozens of award nominations and acting gongs for lead men Cranston and Paul.

In the UK, the breakthrough has been more drip feed and via word of mouth.

Netflix have every previous episode available for catch-up and the last eight episodes will come online every Monday.

But with cliff-hanging tension building for the hundreds of thousands of fans across the UK, nobody is giving anything away as to how the crystal meth criminals will find resolution.

The journey from middle-class high school teacher to drug lord and producer was always going to be a gift for any actor and Cranston has enjoyed every minute of the career-defining role.

And he made sure that his own journey remained a surprise. He said: “The notion of trying to take a serialised television series and change this character has never been done before and I was aghast by that. As I’ve mentioned before, I wanted this role really bad.

“Teaching was Walt’s one true passion besides his family and it was the only thing, when surrounded by muck and mire, that he excelled at.

“I think he was just at a point, now 50, where he was kind of beaten down a little bit and it had taken its toll.

“He was certainly in a depressed state when we started the show. So he could have been Mr Chips maybe 20 years ago but now he’s not.

“And so that was the point where it started for me. His emotions were calloused over by the depression and receiving this news of his eminent demise allowed that volcano of emotions to erupt.

“And when it did, he wasn’t prepared and he wasn’t accustomed to knowing where to put his emotions and it just spewed over everyone and got very messy.”

Cranston revealed that, after a massive journey with Walt, he only got to find out how it ended less than a week before filming the last scenes.

He said: “When we read good scripts, it instils imagination in you immediately so our discussion in the first meeting was how he should look and how he should walk and what his sensibility is and this and that. But we never discussed where it was going to end up.

“It was just too big a subject. As the season went on, I never found out. I never asked. I never wanted to know.

“The twist and turns of my character were so sharp that it wouldn’t help me to know.

“So I was just holding on, much like the audience was, almost week to week. I would read a script about five to six days before we shot it and this was no exception.”

With Cranston’s character Walt now one of the great anti-heroes of modern telly, one of the main questions for fans will be how he is remembered and what kind of man he is.

Gilligan, who is one of the star turns at this year’s Edinburgh International Television Festival which takes place from August 22 to 24, added: “A good argument could be made over whether or not Walt’s particular road to hell paved by good intentions changed him or whether it revealed things that were already within him.

“The longer we did this show, the more I subscribed to the latter argument with that old saying about Hollywood – does stardom turn you into a creep or does it simply reveal who you really are?”